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Keith D. Shepherd leads the Science Domain on Land Health Decisions at the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), Nairobi, Kenya, and heads Decision Analysis and Information Systems in the Research Program on Water, Land, and Ecosystems at the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

A major benefit of decision analysis is making the decision making process more transparent in terms of the factors considered, the ranges of data used and the preferences (e.g. risk tolerance) of the decision makers. For example, when there is disagreement on data associated with a variable, then this can be accommodated by making the probability ranges wide enough to encompass the differences and then you can see whether it really matters or not to the final decision. If it does, then you need to spend more time decomposing the sources of the disagreement and finding out the reasons. It is the insights gained from the decision analysis process itself that are often most useful for making better decisions.

Your statement that there is only weak evidence that monitoring initiatives in environmental management have had a positive impact (I can't speak to agriculture) could be taken the wrong way. Monitoring is absolutely critical but it has to occur over a length of time which is sufficient to overcome the natural variablity which occurs in ecosystems.

On impact of monitoring initiatives, we should first separate the objective of monitoring to acquire basic knowledge of systems and the objective of aiding policy and management decisions. Our point is that it is often difficult to find evidence for impact of monitoring initiatives on the latter and that monitoring could be made much more efficient by first identifying the types of decisions of interest and then using formal analysis of those decisions to pinpoint areas with high information value.

Accessing data on weather and market prices is not a revolutionary step technically, it is simply faster communication with existing news reporting

Using data for new or novel decisionmaking is a whole different ballgame and fraught with problems. The correct question needs to be asked at the start, the data needs editing which starts to involve subjective decisions. Just those tasks are complex enough and that is before any policy determination is made. I dont doubt the potential but I also do not doubt the problems or the fertile field of arguments that will occur at every step particularly by those who do not like the output